Thursday, June 22, 2017

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Slams Torture, Apathy, and the War on Dissent in the US

Claire Bernish - John
Kiriakou never imagined he would become, much less be called, a
whistleblower for speaking out publicly against his CIA employer over a
shadowy torture program he’s come to believe amounts to the most
nefarious of violations of international law, a heinous crime against
humanity, and an affront to otherwise-touted American values of freedom
and justice.

But that’s what happened.

And the ex-CIA officer languished
behind bars for nearly three years for what amounts to a witch hunt
targeting dissenting voices — those situated at the highest levels of
government, down to military and surveillance contractors, and even
extending broadly enough to begin quashing the free press.

Much of this vitriolic war on freedom
taking place inside the confines of the United States arrived neatly
packaged on the coattails of the 9/11 attacks — its War on Terror
sufficiently ambiguous to include actual terrorists as readily as
whistleblowers in its sights.

Mastered impeccably, as no other
administration in U.S. history could have aspired, the War on Terror
birthed an interminable web of odious and authoritarian programs,
including, ultimately, the right of the State to militarily detain —
sans attorney and sans all due process — an American citizen anywhere in
the world, including U.S. soil, should they be even suspected of
terrorism.

It also spawned the surreptitious
re-initiation of the CIA’s torture program — one deemed both illegal and
an egregious violation of human rights long before.

Atrocities have been committed in the
(proven incorrect) name of gleaning sensitive information, including
the use of waterboarding — a technique creating the conditions to
suffocate a person repeatedly, ostensively forcing them to speak in lieu
of enduring further torture — although the echo chamber at the CIA did
not treat the violation of international law as wrong, in any way.

Kiriakou, who eagerly arrived at the
CIA in 1990, ultimately landed the title of Chief of Counterterrorist
Operations in Pakistan in the post-September 11th world. He headed an
operation in March 2002, in Faisalabad, during which Abu Zubaydah,
believed third-in-command of Al Qaeda at the time, was captured.

After resigning from the CIA in 2004, Kiriakou moved to consulting, including as a terrorism consultant for ABC News.

Shattering all illusions the War on
Terror possessed no dark side, Kiriakou ripped into the CIA’s use of
waterboarding — confirming its active practice during interrogations of
senior Al Qaeda officers in an interview with ABC. The agency took note.

But the provocation seemed to linger
in the collective spy agency mind, and, when Kiriakou exchanged
information later determined to be classified, with reporter Matthew
Cole, who mishandled it severely, the CIA secured the albeit baseless
means to proceed with an unofficial punishment of the ex-officer for the
aforementioned transgression.

Incinerating the tightly-steeled door
previously hiding the malignant outgrowth that is the torture of human
beings by a government agency no friend of compassion should have riled
American tempers beyond respite, or until transparency of torture’s
practice and oversight could be applied — save, of course, for the
barbaric program’s deserved termination.

Instead — in thirst for
propaganda-proclaimed security against a terrorist threat the U.S.
government, itself, perpetuates — the somnambulant American public
hardly blinked. An apathy astonishing in its naked inability to see the
humanness in neighbors not situated next door — an apathy gifted by the
Pentagon so war can continue propping up the defense-industry laden
economy, regardless of the destruction wrought.

On Tuesday, I discussed
whistleblowing, transparency, blowback, the path to world war, and more
in an interview with Mr. Kiriakou, so diverse it must be divided into
two parts.

Asked to discuss this dangerous and
lasting trend of apathy from the American public on the topic of torture
— and its undeniable repercussions — as carried out by the United
States government, the whistleblower explained,

“You know, one of the things
that’s been really distressing to me, not even just recently, but over
the years, over the last decade, is that poll after poll after poll
shows that a clear majority of Americans supports the torture program.
And, after everything we’ve learned about torture — that it’s illegal;
it’s immoral; the United Nations considers it to be a crime against
humanity; that it doesn’t work — Americans are still supportive.

“In the immediate aftermath of the
9/11 attacks, I was angry, too. I wanted to kill or capture as many
members of Al Qaeda as I could — as a CIA officer. But we can’t lose
sight of who we are as a people, as a country.”

Elaborating on why he feels trenchant
apathy, rather than compassion or outrage, has been the collective
response to the torture revelations, Kiriakou noted,

“I think, for most people, it’s a
kneejerk reaction — they’re not fully briefed; they’re not fully aware;
they don’t know that there’s a 1946 Federal Torture Act that bans
torture; they don’t know about the McCain-Feinstein Amendment; or about
the United Nations Convention against torture — I think that’s part of
it. I think the other part of it is that American Exceptionalism is a
dangerous thing — and that people genuinely don’t care about respecting
international law, or about what other countries think about us.”

Why that has been the case can be
attributed to a lengthy, if convoluted, list of factors — perhaps the
fury over 9/11 and subsequent attacks never having faded, most elemental
among them — which have tacitly, surreptitiously, and brazenly cleaved
the populace along such superficial lines as blind patriotism versus
holding government accountable for the worst of transgressions.

Without resolute resistance from the
American people to untenable acts of torture committed by the CIA, or
any other government agency or contractor, blowback might as well be
signed, sealed, and delivered — even, ultimately, to our front door.

To ensure morally reprehensible
programs continue unabated — largely to prevent the withering of the
U.S. war machine from lost profits — pro-war propaganda and an
atmosphere conducive to xenophobia have veritably removed connectivity
and compassion from the equation.

“We’ve transitioned into a permanent wartime economy, without even realizing that it was happening,” Kiriakou continued.
“We have been literally at war, continuously, for the last sixteen
years; and, there’s nary an objection on Capitol Hill, or in the media,
or even just among the general population of the country.

“We’ve just accepted, without
comment, the fact that we are permanently at war. And, if we weren’t at
war suddenly, our economy would go into recession.

“I think that our leaders have
done a great disservice to the American people by tricking us into
thinking that this is normal — that it’s normal to constantly be
fighting other countries around the world.”

Further, “When it’s only
poor people, or People of Color, or really, really patriotic
right-wingers, who are going to fight these wars — and the deaths and
the injuries don’t touch the average American — it’s easy to forget that
it’s happening.”

As the former CIA officer-turned
champion of human rights pointed out, a typical U.S. citizen likely
doesn’t comprehend how long troops have been present in Afghanistan,
Iraq, or why our government insists military intervention is happening
in Syria, or could happen with proxy, Russia, or even Iran — much less
that an active campaign now rages in Somalia.

Expecting to enjoin dissent against
militaristic and political agendas about which most aren’t even
cognizant can seem an exercise in futility.

“I don’t think that people even know,” he emphasized, “or if they know, I’m not sure that they care — because it just doesn’t affect them on a day-to-day basis.”

Beyond American public apathy,
however, another dangerous condition, in which the torture program
thrived, unhindered, surrounds the “utter and complete lack of Congressional oversight.

“The oversight committees aren’t
oversight committees: They’re cheerleading committees … When the CIA
comes and asks permission to do something, they cheer them on and egg
them on and increase their budgets, and there’s never any real
oversight.”

When the very committees meant to act
as watchdogs against abuse and corruption instead rubber stamp any
ill-fated program the clandestine agency chooses to manifest, little can
be done to quash potentially ruinous repercussions consequent of that
bad policy. Indeed, Kiriakou emphasized entities meant to oversee such
programs consist primarily of officials also seated on multiple such
committees — meaning, their part-time devotion guarding against failed
policies, by design, lacks teeth.

But if little consideration is
reserved for debating ethics and oversight, likely the worst result of
torture writ large — or, for that matter, of indiscriminate bombing
campaigns against sovereign nations against which no declaration of war
has officially been made — is blowback.

According to The Spy Who Knew Too Much,
however, cognizance of blowback from the CIA’s secretive, heinous
torture program has not brought the topic any more to the forefront, and
although the practice putatively ceased under President Obama, this
slipshod attitude surrounding the costliest of foreign policy and human
rights missteps has not changed.

Kiriakou observed that “the primary reason to sit down and review these programs is blowback.

“Even when I was at the CIA …
thirteen years ago, blowback was never given any consideration on the
Hill. We certainly talked about it at headquarters, but the blowback we
were concerned about was Intelligence blowback, not political or policy
blowback. And, so I think, on the Hill, people just aren’t really used
to focusing on this kind of thing, and so I think they don’t really …
they don’t really care.”

When militants, terrorists, and
individual actors repeatedly carry out malicious acts while citing
iterations of U.S. foreign policy — more keenly, American militarism and
imperialism around the globe — it seems past time to examine blowback
as a peril inextricable from (at least, superficially) laudable goals.

To wit, as Kiriakou penned for TruthDig Monday, “James
Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two contract psychologists who were the
masterminds of the CIA’s torture program, are in for a heap of trouble.
They are defendants in two major lawsuits accusing them of designing,
implementing, overseeing and personally participating in the CIA’s
post-9/11 torture program. That they did exactly that is not in doubt.
Indeed, Mitchell has written proudly of his work in a new book.

“But what makes these cases
newsworthy is that the CIA has apparently turned its back on the two,
offering no support and even cooperating with the plaintiffs by
voluntarily turning over documents and refusing to supply CIA officers
to serve as defense witnesses.”

Dismissal of its
perpetually-protective stance of agents accused of misbehavior, Kiriakou
posits, evinces a telling shift in the CIA’s position on torture — as
the shame of an agency’s failed policy begins blowing back in attempts
to hold specific people accountable for grievous wrongdoing.

While that would appear true to some
degree, I asked how that indicator could be taken as a positive
development, without also considering Washington’s veritable war on
whistleblowers — a definitive method for ensuring lack of transparency
in government, a censored press, and a somnambulant,
security-over-freedom-loving populace.

“I’m gonna give you a personal example,” the ex-CIA officer proffered, after some consideration. “After
my arrest, we received discovery from the Justice Department. And, in
the thousands and thousands of pages of discovery, we found several
memos between the CIA and the Justice Department. And one of the memos
from the CIA to the Justice Department said, ‘Charge him with espionage.’

“And the Justice Department wrote back and said, ‘But he hasn’t committed espionage.’

“And then the CIA wrote back and said, ‘Charge him anyway, and make him defend himself.’
And that’s exactly what they did. And that’s what they’ve done to
Reality Winner; that’s what they’ve done to [Edward] Snowden; that’s
what they did to Jeffrey Sterling.”

Silencing dissent inarguably also
involves the muzzling of whistleblowers in conjunction with erasure of
transparency in governmental policy, both to camouflage and
perpetuate unsavory and illegal acts — such as the Bush-era CIA torture
program, one proven fruitless and, worse, contrary to virtually every
agenda the American empire claims in the complex Middle East theater.

In fact, this domestic and
international sprint into unnecessary self-destruction typically
characterizes a moribund, decaying empire — desperate to effect control
as it slides into the annals of history.

In the second portion of my
conversation with John Kiriakou, he elucidates the belligerence playing
out in the Middle East and elsewhere, and the perilous course it likely
signifies, as well as more on what the term “whistleblower” truly means,
and why freedom of the press — including Wikileaks — is central to
maintaining a base of rights and liberties during these tumultuous
times.